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26 years later: Remembering the Chernobyl nuclear disaster

The direct environmental implications of last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan will not be known for some time, if at all. Those potentially exposed to the small amounts of radiation that escaped during the long struggle to contain the melting nuclear cores have only a few points of reference to draw from. On the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, many are looking toward the people of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine as they continue to monitor the health and well-being of their loved ones with increasing concern.
In the 26 years since the explosion that spewed radioactive particles over millions of acres of former Soviet soil, only a few hundred deaths have been directly connected to the Chernobyl disaster. According to the World Nuclear Association, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) states that “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.” Still, many studies have shown a wide range of health implications that could be attributed to the slight increase in radiation exposure, including the spike in thyroid cancers among children near Chernobyl’s 19-mile radius exclusion zone.

A recent article from The Mainichi reports that the Japanese and Ukranian governments reached an agreement to exchange research and findings from the two nuclear disasters. With the hope that Japan can learn from Chernobyl’s past and present relief efforts, we take a look back at those affected by the twenty-six year old nuclear disaster and the ensuing years of fear and uncertainty.

April 26, 2012: A dosimeter reading is seen in front of the shelter over destroyed 4th block of Chernobyl Power Plant. The world on Thursday marks a 26th anniversary since the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. (Genya Savilov/AFP Photo/Getty Images)

April 26, 2012: Ukraine launched construction of a new containment shelter to permanently secure the stricken Chernobyl plant as it marked the 26th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. President Viktor Yanukovych pressed a symbolic button at the construction site, watched by workers and ambassadors from China, Japan and a number of other countries that contributed to the massive project, expected to cost 1.5 billion euros. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

April 26, 2012: Children lay flowers at a monument to victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Kiev. Ukraine marked the 26th anniversary on Thursday of the world’s worst nuclear accident at its Chernobyl power plant. (Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters)

April 26, 2012: People hold portraits of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, during a ceremony in Kiev. (Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters)

April 26, 2012: A young boy looks at the rifle of a soldier standing guard in front of Chernobyl victims memorial in Kiev during a memorial ceremony. (Genya Savilov/AFP Photo/Getty Images)

April 26, 2012: Belarussian honour guard soldiers take part in a ceremony at the monument to the victims of Chernobyl tragedy in Minsk. (Viktor Drachev/AFP Photo/Getty Images)

April 26, 2012: Chernobyl victims’ portraits are displayed during a memorial ceremony in Slavutich. Some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the accident site, Slavutich is where many of the power station’s personnel used to live. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

April 26, 2012: Staff of the Chernobyl nuclear plant light candles at a memorial dedicated to firefighters and workers who died after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster during a night service near the Chernobyl plant in the city of Slavutych. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

April 26, 2012: Children hold candles at the monument to Chernobyl victims during the early morning memorial ceremony in Slavutich. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP Photo/Getty Images)

April 24, 2012: A Belarussian woman kisses a portrait at her relative’s grave during Radunitsa, a holiday in the Eastern Orthodox Church to remember the dead, in the abandoned village of Lomysh, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, some 370 km (230 miles) southeast of Minsk. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

April 23, 2012: Villager Ivan Shamianok, 87, walks in his house at the abandoned village of Tulgovichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, some 370 km (230 miles) southeast of Minsk. Shamianok never left his village in spite of the Chernobyl blast, and he is now one of six last villagers that still live in Tulgovichi. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

April 23, 2012: Villager Ivan Shamianok talks with former neighbours on the eve of Radunitsa at a cemetery in the abandoned village of Tulgovichi. Every year, residents who left their villages after the Chernobyl blast gather at the cemeteries for a day to visit their relatives’ graves and to meet with former friends and neighbours. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

April 23, 2012: A Belarussian man sits at his relative’s grave on the eve of Radunitsa in the abandoned village of Tulgovichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, some 370 km (230 miles) southeast of Minsk. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

April 23, 2012: A Belarussian villager pushes a trolley containing products purchased from a mobile shop on the eve of Radunitsa, or the Day of Rejoicing, in the abandoned village of Tulgovichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

April 23, 2012: A man carries a cross at a cemetery in the abandoned village of Dovliady in the 10 km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, some 400 km (249 miles) southeast of the Belarus capital Minsk. (Victor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images)

November 3, 2011: Demonstrators demolish a fence during a protest rally in front of the Ukrainian parliament headquarters in Kiev. Participants, consisting of “liquidators” or emergency workers who fought the blaze at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, veterans of the 1979-89 Soviet Afghan war and supporters of opposition organizations, tried to storm into the parliament building protesting against government policies, and in particular, plans to cut their payouts and subsidies, according to local media. (Vladimir Sindeyev/Reuters)

August 6, 2011: A geiger counter is placed in front of sunflowers in full bloom in Fukushima, northern Japan. At a temple in Fukushima thousands of sunflowers have been planted to help fight the radiation. Sunflowers were used near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear accident to extract radioactive caesium from contaminated ponds nearby. Japanese scientists are carrying out tests to prove their usefulness in fighting radiation. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)

April 18, 2011: A doll and gas masks are pictured on a bed in one of the kindergarten classrooms in the ghost city of Pripyat. Deserted since the 1986 catastrophe, Pripyat once housed 30,000 people, the majority being workers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Days after the catastrophe the inhabitants were relocated to other locations in the Soviet Union and the town has remained uninhabited ever since. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

April 18, 2011: A visitor takes a self-portrait in front of the 4th power block of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In the heart of Chernobyl, Ukrainian specialists regularly venture inside the concrete cover sheltering the ruined reactor after it exploded on April 26, 1986 to check its structure and radiation levels. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

March 17, 2011: Vadym Buyalsky, Ph.D., R&D, Senior Scientist with CTRL Systems, Inc., who worked at Chernobyl, gave insight as to what’s going on at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. On the desk under his left hand is a schematic of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. He received a medal with the inscription that translates to: “To the participant of the elimination of the consequences of the accident at Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.” (Algerina Perna/Baltimore Sun)

April 4, 2011: Graffiti is pictured on a wall in the ghost city of Pripyat near the fourth nuclear reactor (background) at the former Chernobyl Nuclear power plant. A project to build a new sarcophagus over the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor lacks some 600 million euros of the 1.5 billion needed, a Ukrainian official said in March 2011. The concrete sarcophagus capping the reactor has developed cracks and is not considered failsafe.(Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

April 26, 2010: Young Belarusian protesters take part in a rally to commemorate Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Minsk. Several hundred people gathered in Minsk to mark the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, in what has become an annual gathering of opposition activists. (Victor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images)

April 6, 2006: A worker of the Belarussian radiation ecology reserve measures the level of radiation at Belarussian village Vorotets, inside the 30-km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster severely contaminated one quarter of Belarus’ territory and tens of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes as radiation from Chernobyl spread throughout the area. (Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images)

January 25, 2006: The remnants of beds are seen abandoned in a preschool in the deserted town of Pripyat, Ukraine. Scientists estimate that the most dangerous radioactive elements will take up to 900 years to decay sufficiently to render the area safe. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

January 25, 2006: The Chernobyl Power Plant is seen in the distance as the abandoned town of Pripyat stretches out in the foreground near Chernobyl. Prypyat and the surrounding area will not be safe for human habitation for several centuries. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

September 2, 2004: One month after surgeons successfully removed cancer that had spread from his kidney to his lungs, Yuriy Olyshko is recovering at home with his wife, Natalya, in their Rosedale apartment. Olyshko worked as a liquidator (clean-up workers at the reactor complex), in 1986 after a nuclear reactor exploded and released radioactive fission products released during the core meltdown into the atmosphere. (Patuxent Publishing)

July 25, 2001: Belarus native Vadzim Ihnatsyeu poses with Suzee, a toy fox terrier, owned by the American family Vadzim has been staying with for the past six weeks. Ten kids from Chernobyl area of the former Soviet Union traveled to the U.S. for six weeks to spend time away from the “hot zone.” Vadzim was taken in by the Sopher family of Parkton, Maryland. (Patuxent Publishing)

April 26, 2001: A relative of a worker who died following the clean-up operations for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion wipes tears away at the wreath laying ceremony at the Chernobyl’s victim monument in Ukraine’s capital of Kiev. On the left is a depiction of the sarcophagus. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo)

April 17, 1996: A worker at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant takes a reading of radioactivity inside the “tomb” encasing the ruined fourth reactor. Readings here in 1996 were 800 roentgens per minute, one-tenth of what they were by the “elephant’s foot” – the tangled mass of concrete and steel at the right of the nuclear fuel which melted in the accident. (Stringer/Reuters)

April 9, 1996: Olga Derzhutskaya, 6, undergoes medical observation after an operation for thyroid cancer at the radiation medicine center in Gomel. Officials recorded large increases in thyroid cancers after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, with the highest incidence in the Gomel district north of the stricken power station. (Mikhail Chernichkin/Reuters)

2 Comments

[…] 26 years later: Remembering the Chernobyl nuclear disaster The direct environmental implications of last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan will not be known for some time, if at all. Those potentially exposed to the small amounts of radiation that escaped during the long struggle to contain the … Read more on Baltimore Sun […]

Awhile back I wrote the novel “Rad Decision” to provide an entertaining inside look at how US nuclear plants operate from the point of view of someone who does it every day, The book is now free online, with no advertisements or sponsors – just google the title or go to my homepage. The plant involved and the climatic event bear some simularities to Fukushima. “Rad Decision” is written for the lay person and there are many reader reviews are at the homepage or Amazon. I think we’ll make better decisions about our energy future if we first understand our energy present. The book also features a detailed look at Chernobyl – that section is linked on the homepage.

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Bob Rhodes: Very interesting read....I have read previously about terrap…